What do you think?
Rate this book
Love and War Series #5
The Black Maria
When love becomes your greatest enemy.
Moscow, 1935. Stalin is in power. People live in constant fear – fear of each other, fear of being denounced, and fear of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. Ordinary citizens live behind a mask – a public face that enables them to toe the Party line and conceal their true feelings and personal thoughts.
One such citizen is thirty-year-old Maria. She has a past – the sort that, if known, would cost her her freedom. So monstrous her crime, she is forced to live a lie. Maria marries Petrov, a Party activist, not out of love, but as a means of forming a new identity, to escape her past. Her existence is safe – but dull. Until the day she meets Dmitry.
Dmitry is an artist, whose work allows him a standard of living above the average Muscovite. But Dmitry feels straitjacketed by what he’s allowed to paint. Instead of the state approved rural idyll of his latest commission, he aspires to paint the female form. But when Maria offers to pose for him, he refuses – until he falls in love with her.
Dmitry’s artistic aspirations and Maria’s yearning for a new life force them to risk everything in the name of love and freedom.
‘The Black Maria’ is a novel about truth – the distortion of it, and the fear of it. And at the heart of the novel, is Maria’s brutal past. When love comes unexpectedly, it threatens to expose the truth and destroy her.
“I'm seriously in awe. It's a remarkable piece of work. It's dark, gritty, and really quite disturbing. And heartbreaking at the same time. A brilliant achievement!” Sinead Fitzgibbon.
Rupert Colley is the founder, editor and writer of the highly successful ‘History In An Hour’ series of ebooks and audio, published by HarperCollins.
‘The Black Maria’ is his third novel.
Moscow, 1935. Stalin is in power. People live in constant fear – fear of each other, fear of being denounced, and fear of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. Ordinary citizens live behind a mask – a public face that enables them to toe the Party line and conceal their true feelings and personal thoughts.
One such citizen is thirty-year-old Maria. She has a past – the sort that, if known, would cost her her freedom. So monstrous her crime, she is forced to live a lie. Maria marries Petrov, a Party activist, not out of love, but as a means of forming a new identity, to escape her past. Her existence is safe – but dull. Until the day she meets Dmitry.
Dmitry is an artist, whose work allows him a standard of living above the average Muscovite. But Dmitry feels straitjacketed by what he’s allowed to paint. Instead of the state approved rural idyll of his latest commission, he aspires to paint the female form. But when Maria offers to pose for him, he refuses – until he falls in love with her.
Dmitry’s artistic aspirations and Maria’s yearning for a new life force them to risk everything in the name of love and freedom.
‘The Black Maria’ is a novel about truth – the distortion of it, and the fear of it. And at the heart of the novel, is Maria’s brutal past. When love comes unexpectedly, it threatens to expose the truth and destroy her.
“I'm seriously in awe. It's a remarkable piece of work. It's dark, gritty, and really quite disturbing. And heartbreaking at the same time. A brilliant achievement!” Sinead Fitzgibbon.
Rupert Colley is the founder, editor and writer of the highly successful ‘History In An Hour’ series of ebooks and audio, published by HarperCollins.
‘The Black Maria’ is his third novel.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
249 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 14, 2013
64 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
Rupert Colley
32 books131 followersFounder, writer and Series Editor of History In An Hour (http://historyinanhour.com), owned by HarperCollins UK, and now author of two novels.
The first, "My Brother the Enemy", a novella, is set during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
The second, "This Time Tomorrow", set during and following World War One, is a compelling story of war, brotherly love, passion and betrayal.
My third novel, "The Black Maria", is set in Moscow in 1935, the height of Stalin's reign, about love crushed by the machine.
The first, "My Brother the Enemy", a novella, is set during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
The second, "This Time Tomorrow", set during and following World War One, is a compelling story of war, brotherly love, passion and betrayal.
My third novel, "The Black Maria", is set in Moscow in 1935, the height of Stalin's reign, about love crushed by the machine.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 29, 2013
I've always thought the Solzhenitsyn course I took in college was all I'd ever need for an insider's perspective of Stalinist Russia. But although it's been decades since took that course, I don't recall being quite as thoroughly chilled by Solzhenitsyn's novels as I was with Rupert Colley's The Black Maria.
Perhaps this is because 1) Solzhenitsyn came to understand the evil of the system not as a civilian but as a respected military man before he was arrested and sent to a labor camp for criticizing, in a private letter, Stalin's handling of World War II; and 2) his most powerful works deal with imprisonment: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, for example.
Colley's protagonist, Maria Radekovna, on the other hand, is a civilian who is relatively free (although arrest and imprisonment are constant threats) and perhaps that is why I found her to be a more relatable character than many of those found in Solzhenitsyn's great works.
When her story begins, the reader finds Maria tightly bound by the tentacles of the secret police. Her brother Victor -- having recently returned from a labor camp an emotional vegetable -- is the reason she has been forced into a job that requires her to "out" someone every two weeks, someone who is (or isn't -- it really doesn't matter) being ever so slightly disloyal to the State. Victor's sad life would be over if Maria didn't keep making her twice-monthly reports against her fellow-citizens, most of whom haven't uttered a disloyal syllable. Their lives for her brother's.
Maria is also trapped in a loveless marriage with an insipid Party official because he knows something about her history. And in this real-life dystopia items in one's past that would be considered inconsequential from a western perspective could be absolutely devastating for those who were attempting to survive during this time and place.
On the horizon of Maria's bleak world there suddenly appears a handsome, independently-minded artist who is, for the moment, enjoying state-sponsored patronage only because Stalin can see the propaganda value in art -- "The artist is the engineer of the soul."
Passion, loyalty, love, betrayal, and death play out between a small cast of finely crafted characters within a page-turning plotline, as they always do in Colley's historical fiction. But this book kept me turning (er, clicking) the pages a bit faster than the others. Perhaps this has something to do with the book's construction or else because The Black Maria takes place in Moscow, in the heart of Soviet Russia (as opposed to a satellite Iron Curtain country like Hungary, the setting of Colley's My Brother, the Enemy). Moscow in the 1930's was Communism exactly as Stalin desired it to be and this book gives a close-up view of the constant terror Muscovites were forced to endure as Stalin's secret police waged their ideological war on their own people via purge after endless purge, denunciation after endless denunciation.
Colley, a former librarian, wrote The Black Maria after wading through multiple accounts of those who had witnessed the Soviet terror. It shows. He even -- quite chillingly -- is able to get into the mindset of those orchestrating this "war", phrasing it like this:
"We are fighting a war, and our enemy is an internal one, one that doesn’t wear a uniform. We must always be vigilant; we can’t afford to spare the rod, not until our work is done.’
They were, most unfortunately, true to their aims and the way in which Colley captures this piece of history will stay with the reader perhaps longer than they wish it to.
Perhaps this is because 1) Solzhenitsyn came to understand the evil of the system not as a civilian but as a respected military man before he was arrested and sent to a labor camp for criticizing, in a private letter, Stalin's handling of World War II; and 2) his most powerful works deal with imprisonment: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, for example.
Colley's protagonist, Maria Radekovna, on the other hand, is a civilian who is relatively free (although arrest and imprisonment are constant threats) and perhaps that is why I found her to be a more relatable character than many of those found in Solzhenitsyn's great works.
When her story begins, the reader finds Maria tightly bound by the tentacles of the secret police. Her brother Victor -- having recently returned from a labor camp an emotional vegetable -- is the reason she has been forced into a job that requires her to "out" someone every two weeks, someone who is (or isn't -- it really doesn't matter) being ever so slightly disloyal to the State. Victor's sad life would be over if Maria didn't keep making her twice-monthly reports against her fellow-citizens, most of whom haven't uttered a disloyal syllable. Their lives for her brother's.
Maria is also trapped in a loveless marriage with an insipid Party official because he knows something about her history. And in this real-life dystopia items in one's past that would be considered inconsequential from a western perspective could be absolutely devastating for those who were attempting to survive during this time and place.
On the horizon of Maria's bleak world there suddenly appears a handsome, independently-minded artist who is, for the moment, enjoying state-sponsored patronage only because Stalin can see the propaganda value in art -- "The artist is the engineer of the soul."
Passion, loyalty, love, betrayal, and death play out between a small cast of finely crafted characters within a page-turning plotline, as they always do in Colley's historical fiction. But this book kept me turning (er, clicking) the pages a bit faster than the others. Perhaps this has something to do with the book's construction or else because The Black Maria takes place in Moscow, in the heart of Soviet Russia (as opposed to a satellite Iron Curtain country like Hungary, the setting of Colley's My Brother, the Enemy). Moscow in the 1930's was Communism exactly as Stalin desired it to be and this book gives a close-up view of the constant terror Muscovites were forced to endure as Stalin's secret police waged their ideological war on their own people via purge after endless purge, denunciation after endless denunciation.
Colley, a former librarian, wrote The Black Maria after wading through multiple accounts of those who had witnessed the Soviet terror. It shows. He even -- quite chillingly -- is able to get into the mindset of those orchestrating this "war", phrasing it like this:
"We are fighting a war, and our enemy is an internal one, one that doesn’t wear a uniform. We must always be vigilant; we can’t afford to spare the rod, not until our work is done.’
They were, most unfortunately, true to their aims and the way in which Colley captures this piece of history will stay with the reader perhaps longer than they wish it to.
August 24, 2013
In his first novel, 'My Brother the Enemy', Rupert Colley deftly evoked the battle-scarred streets of revolutionary Hungary in 1956. His next outing, 'This Time Tomorrow', transported readers to the trenches of World War One, which were conjured with remarkable verisimilitude. Both, in their own way, examine the resilience of the human spirit, while never shying away from the less admirable elements of human nature which often come to the fore when we are tested to the limits of our endurance. In 'The Black Maria', his third novel, Colley takes us to Stalinist Russia to explore this theme even further.
The book opens in 1992. The eponymous Maria, now an old woman, is living out her declining years in a stifling Moscow apartment with only a taciturn maid and her memories for company. Neither is a source of much comfort to her. The arrival from Britain of her grandson, whom she has never previously met, awakens in Maria a desire to, finally, recount the story of her life. It is a terrifying and tragic tale of the realities of life under Stalin's brutal regime. Colley is unflinching in his depiction of the depravity that can be borne out of desperate circumstances, and in doing so he examines the depths to which we are capable of descending when faced with little other choice.
This novel is hard-hitting, dark and, at times, unpalatable. It is also honest. Because although Maria's past deeds may have blackened her soul, the reader does not despise her. We are left feeling that she is not, in fact, the `black' Maria - she is, like us all, a curious shade of grey.
This is, in my opinion, Rupert Colley's best novel yet.
The book opens in 1992. The eponymous Maria, now an old woman, is living out her declining years in a stifling Moscow apartment with only a taciturn maid and her memories for company. Neither is a source of much comfort to her. The arrival from Britain of her grandson, whom she has never previously met, awakens in Maria a desire to, finally, recount the story of her life. It is a terrifying and tragic tale of the realities of life under Stalin's brutal regime. Colley is unflinching in his depiction of the depravity that can be borne out of desperate circumstances, and in doing so he examines the depths to which we are capable of descending when faced with little other choice.
This novel is hard-hitting, dark and, at times, unpalatable. It is also honest. Because although Maria's past deeds may have blackened her soul, the reader does not despise her. We are left feeling that she is not, in fact, the `black' Maria - she is, like us all, a curious shade of grey.
This is, in my opinion, Rupert Colley's best novel yet.
November 21, 2020
Being a baby boomer born in 1949 I grew up the Cold War Era and knowing nothing of the USSR except fear. Reading this book opened my eyes to the miserable life Soviet citizens led under the rule of Stalin. Not wanting to minimize the Holocaust in any way, I plan on looking for more historic novels centered around the monster Joseph Stalin. Mr Colley writes in such a way that puts you into the pages of this series
January 8, 2024
Jean38no
A interesting Historical fiction of the time in Russia during Stalin’s dictatorship . How the people were so afraid of the state they would use a word or anything to turn in family, neighbor, anyone to the Secret police. People disappeared behind a iron curtain to a gulag. This is the story of one women’s story during those times. How she was forced to report to Secret police because of her brother. A real page turner I stayed up at night to finish it
A interesting Historical fiction of the time in Russia during Stalin’s dictatorship . How the people were so afraid of the state they would use a word or anything to turn in family, neighbor, anyone to the Secret police. People disappeared behind a iron curtain to a gulag. This is the story of one women’s story during those times. How she was forced to report to Secret police because of her brother. A real page turner I stayed up at night to finish it
September 7, 2024
Black Maria
It is an interesting novel that describes the difficulties living in Russia during Stalin's reign. Clearly depicted is the fear that everyone was subject to and the loneliness of holding on to secrets . Reading this one becomes more aware of the freedoms that we have according to where we live. It is definitely an eye-opening story .
It is an interesting novel that describes the difficulties living in Russia during Stalin's reign. Clearly depicted is the fear that everyone was subject to and the loneliness of holding on to secrets . Reading this one becomes more aware of the freedoms that we have according to where we live. It is definitely an eye-opening story .
October 4, 2022
a good insight
It gives a good insight of life in socialist Russia. I find the series offers an brief glimpse into the struggles of various countries
It gives a good insight of life in socialist Russia. I find the series offers an brief glimpse into the struggles of various countries
January 24, 2018
So uninteresting I can’t even remember it now. Filled with clichés.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews